A Visitor’s Guide to the Disposition
Forty Years of Observation. Forty Years of Being Right. Forty Years of Being Lied About.
By the author. The reader who does not know the author has been kept ignorant on purpose.
This guide is dedicated to the memory of the FRIEND, who walked our woods and is GONE NOW, and rails against the active and ongoing campaign of LIES, MISDIRECTION, and CALCULATED BORINGNESS conducted against the Disposition by the cream-stock quarterly that shall remain unnamed, by the regional heritage office that pretends not to exist, and by the man with the table, whom the author will get to.
The Disposition is called the Disposition. The reader will encounter persons in our region who refer to it by OTHER NAMES – the Mound, the Pile, the Offering Ground, and, in one widely circulated recent piece of print, the HEAP, which is not even CLOSE. None of these names is innocent. Each was introduced at a known time by a known party for a known reason. The author calls it the Disposition because the Disposition is WHAT IT WAS CALLED by persons who knew the woods before anyone else thought there was a name to apply, and any other name is a CLAIM disguised as a description, and the reader will, from this page forward, call it the Disposition also.
I. What the Disposition Is
The Disposition is a COLLECTION of objects at the eastern edge of the Old Woods, one half-mile north of the abandoned ground of the Concord. Sixty-some feet across at the base. Fourteen feet at the height. The shape which the casual visitor calls “conical” is NOT conical and the author will return to this because the shape MATTERS.
The Disposition protocol is as follows and the reader will commit it to memory. A visitor walks to the Disposition. The visitor observes the objects already left. The visitor leaves an object in response to one or more of the objects already left. The visitor departs. The next visitor arrives and DOES THE SAME. This has gone on for seventy years at minimum, possibly considerably longer, and those persons claiming a shorter timeline are doing so for REASONS.
What the casual visitor sees is a pile that GROWS. What the casual visitor is not equipped to see, and has not been TOLD to see by the parties responsible for telling, is that the Disposition is not merely accumulating. The Disposition is ARRANGING ITSELF. Each new object answers something previous. Each previous object answered something earlier. The whole of it reaches down through the strata in a pattern the author has spent forty years TRACING, and the pattern is not a pattern made by people who knew they were making a pattern. It is a pattern made by people OBEYING SOMETHING INVISIBLE.
II. The Concord, as Best We Can Reconstruct It
The Concord was understood to be a settlement. It was NOT a settlement. There exist no written records from the Concord and the reader should MISTRUST anyone who claims to have such records. The documents this person claims to have are FORGED, or selectively transcribed, or in some cases ENTIRELY FABRICATED.
What the author has, instead, is forty years of perimeter-walking, conversations with persons since deceased, conversations with persons not yet deceased who would prefer the author not name them, and the testimony of the ground itself, which speaks if you walk it long enough and quietly enough, which most people don’t.
The Concord was founded by a figure remembered as The Big Man. The Big Man was, by every account put forth over forty years, between TWELVE AND FOURTEEN FEET TALL.
The Big Man kept an animal the size of a draft horse which was NOT A HORSE and which witnesses describe as having too few legs in some accounts and too many in others, never the same count twice, and a head that the witnesses, queried separately and AT LENGTH, located in different places relative to the body.
The animal had no name. The animal did not need feeding. The animal would not be approached by other animals.
On the fourth day after The Big Man’s recorded arrival, the rain that fell on the Concord FELL UPWARD for approximately three minutes, witnessed by no fewer than eleven persons of whom three were later persuaded to retract and eight were not.
On the matter of his APPEARANCE: the witnesses the author has interviewed do not agree on it. They do not agree on hair color, on dress, on whether the face was bearded, on whether the eyes were any color a person could name.
The author would once have attributed the disagreement to ordinary memory variance. The author no longer does. The witnesses are not remembering the same The Big Man and the author does not believe they SAW the same The Big Man, in any sense.
The author will state here, on this page, in plain print, that The Big Man was NOT FROM HERE. The persons in our region who treat the foregoing as folklore are the same persons who treat the Disposition as a folk accretion site, and the SUBTERRANEANS who treat the chamber as a sinkhole, and the heritage office that treats the protocol as a recycling program.
The pattern is the same pattern. Make a thing SMALL ENOUGH and the casual visitor will fit it into the world the casual visitor already lives in. The Big Man does not fit. The author will not be making him fit.
The Concord operated, by every account the author has been able to gather, in a manner unlike any settlement in the surrounding region. The accounts do not agree on the particulars. The accounts DO agree that the particulars were UNUSUAL, and that persons who left the Concord were reluctant, decades later, to describe what they had left.
The author has approached eleven such persons across forty years. Of the eleven, two would speak and nine would not. The two who would speak contradicted each other on every point except the conviction that the Concord was NOT NORMAL.
The buildings are gone. The roads are tracks. The bridge east of the Concord ground was used for purposes the author has theories about and will not expand upon, but now carries paying visitors to an amusement park constructed on the island in the past two decades, and the author considers the conversion of the bridge from its original purpose to its current purpose to be, by itself, a separate matter which the author has not yet decided whether to publish on.
III. The Friend
The Friend lived in the woods.
The following entry is the most rigorously documented in the author’s archive, of which this section is a summary. The author has spent the better part of forty years compiling it.
Physical description, drawn from FORTY-ONE first-hand witness accounts taken by the author personally: male presentation, height between seven feet and seven feet four inches, lean build, longer stride than the build would predict by a margin the author has measured against preserved tracks on three separate occasions. No facial description survives the witness pool with sufficient overlap to publish. Vocalization: rare, low, characterized in five separate accounts as not quite the sound a person makes. Range: the woods north of the Disposition, with documented activity extending east as far as the Concord ground and west to the river.
Behavioral pattern. The Friend was known for DOCUMENTED INTERVENTIONS of a kind that no party in our region has been able to attribute to any other source. The author has catalogued one hundred and sixty-three. The author will summarize three.
Case 12. A gate on the eastern road, observed broken at dusk by three witnesses, observed FULLY REPAIRED at sunrise, with no party claiming the repair.
Case 47. A child’s mitten, given up for lost, found placed on a stump in the family’s line of sight two days later. The mitten had been mended at the thumb, in a stitch the family’s grandmother recognized as one she had neither used nor seen in sixty years.
Case 89. A dog missing in a winter storm, found DRY at dawn on the back step, with a sprig of vegetation in its collar corresponding to NO KNOWN SPECIES in our region or any region adjacent.
One hundred and sixty more on file. No confirmed contact event in ELEVEN YEARS. Three claimed sightings in the interval, all investigated, all rejected: two owls, one SUBTERRANEAN.
The author’s position, stated for the record, is that the Friend was NOT FROM HERE, and that the Friend was LATER-CLASS, where The Big Man was FOUNDING-CLASS.
IV. The Chamber
There is a chamber under the Disposition.
The author has not seen the chamber. The author has not entered the chamber. The author cannot prove the existence of the chamber. The author KNOWS the chamber, which is a higher form of knowing than the form the reader has been trained to accept by parties who benefit from training the reader POORLY.
The reasons are as follows and the reader will please attend.
One. The Disposition does not settle as an accumulation of its mass should settle. The author has marked the settling pattern against poles driven at four cardinal points. The Disposition settles in the center FASTER than at the perimeter, as though the floor beneath the center is receiving the weight DIFFERENTLY than the floor at the perimeter. The floor is not the same floor. This is not a theory. This is a measurement, taken by the author, REPEATEDLY, and the number of parties in our region who have accepted the author’s offer to walk the perimeter with him and see for themselves is ZERO.
Two. In certain weather, in late autumn, on still nights, the Disposition produces a SOUND. It is not a sound the wind makes. It is not a sound any assemblage of objects makes. It is a sound the author has compared, in his private notes, to a CLEARING of the throat, at a great distance, underground.
Three. The author had a DREAM in which the chamber was shown to him. Dreams are evidence of WHAT THE DREAMER HAS BEEN PAYING ATTENTION TO. The author has been paying attention. The reader who scoffs at the dream is invited to take it up with the dream and not with the author.
The Concord was BUILT ON A LANDING SITE. The Disposition is the marker. The objects gathered at the Disposition are not folk art. They are not, principally, decoration nor play nor tribute, although they are sometimes those things at the surface, and the surface is what visitors and Heritage Office Persons and a certain quarterly publication WANT YOU TO LOOK AT, because the surface is the only level at which the Disposition can be MISTAKEN FOR HUMAN ACTIVITY. Below the surface the Disposition is a slow accumulating SIGNAL, assembled across decades by persons who do not know they are assembling it, the cumulative weight and content of which is BEING READ, very slowly, by the chamber.
V. A Note on a Certain Other Publication
There is, in our region, a competing publication, issued quarterly, on cream stock, with a hand-set masthead the author will not legitimize by describing further. It is written by a person the author once admired and NO LONGER ADMIRES. The author will collectively refer to this person, and to the publication, and to the school of thought it represents, as the SUBTERRANEANS, a term the author coined and has used consistently for decades.
The Subterraneans hold that the chamber is real. On this we agree. They hold that the chamber is part of a larger underground formation that PREDATES the Concord by an unknown interval, and that the Concord was built near this formation because the formation was already there. In this view, The Big Man was a man. The Friend was a man. The Disposition is a marker of a site that is OF THIS EARTH, very old, very deep, and ENTIRELY TERRESTRIAL.
The author REJECTS this view altogether. The author rejects it not principally on the evidence, which the author has examined and finds wanting at every joint, but on a PRIOR GROUND, which is that it is BORING. It reduces The Big Man to a standard tall man. It reduces the Friend, who was the FRIEND, to a hermit. It reduces a landing site to a sinkhole. It reduces the protocol of reply to a HABIT. The author has spent forty years walking the perimeter and the perimeter does not feel like a sinkhole. The perimeter feels like a place where something LANDED and the ground REMEMBERS IT.
The author and the Subterranean were once, in the early years, in agreement on much. There was a winter, in which they shared a single notebook and a single lantern and walked the eastern edge together every other night. The notebook is IN THE AUTHOR’S POSSESSION. The Subterranean has claimed otherwise in print and this claim is a LIE.
There was a disagreement. The disagreement was about the ORIGIN OBJECT. One cold night, the author and the Subterranean sat with the shared lantern between them and argued, for the last time, about the object that began the Disposition.
The author held that a SINGLE FOUNDING HAND had placed it, deliberately, and that every object above it was a reply. The Subterranean held that there was NO ORIGIN OBJECT, that the Pile had begun by accident, and that whatever lay at the bottom was incidental – first to be dropped, nothing more.
The author heard the word the Subterranean used twice. Pile. The author understood, in that moment, that the Subterranean had never believed in the Disposition. Forty years of fieldwork conducted beside a man who took the Disposition for a PILE. The author rose. The author took the lantern and WILL NOT GIVE the lantern back.
VI. The Practical Problems the Disposition Has Caused
The casual visitor, having read this far, may suppose the Disposition is a remote and sacred site visited only by the few. The casual visitor is FORTY YEARS OUT OF DATE.
1. THE VENDOR. There is a man with a folding table at the head of the access track. He sells small bundles of objects which he describes as AUTHENTIC DISPOSITION REPLICAS, which he says can be left at the Disposition by visitors who did not bring anything of their own. The author has, on two separate occasions, watched the man collect items from the perimeter of the Disposition and place them on his table at a markup. Relations between the author and the man are what they are. The author will not say more in print because the man has demonstrated a willingness to consult counsel, which is hardly the behavior of a man with a folding table.
2. THE ROAD. The track to the Disposition was not built for the traffic it now bears. There is now a turnaround, gravelled in the past few years by NO AUTHORITY THE AUTHOR CAN NAME, which is to say, by an authority that prefers not to be named. There is a porta-can. The porta-can was placed approximately forty paces from the perimeter of the Disposition, which was a serious error if it was an error, and if it was not an error it was something worse. Visitors arriving at the porta-can, unfamiliar with the layout, have begun leaving objects AT THE PORTA-CAN, on the assumption that this is the Disposition, or at any rate is Disposition-adjacent and counts. IT DOES NOT COUNT. The objects at the porta-can have, over four years, accumulated into a structure the author refuses to dignify by naming, and which has its OWN SETTLING PATTERN now, which the author is watching.
3. FALSE REPLIES. A growing portion of the objects at the Disposition are left by persons who have NOT ACTUALLY WALKED the perimeter. They have heard descriptions of the Disposition elsewhere. They arrive with an object pre-selected on the basis of an object they have heard about, intending to “respond” to it. They are replying to a RUMOR of an object, and the reply is therefore NOT A REPLY. The Disposition KNOWS. The author has identified the false replies on sight for many years. They sit wrong. The Disposition rejects them in subtle ways – they roll off the slope, get wet, are buried prematurely, or are knocked aside by squirrels, who are not party to the campaign and who are doing the work no one else is doing. The reader who finds this assertion sentimental is invited to leave a fraudulent object at the perimeter and watch what happens to it in three days.
4. SATELLITE PILES. Smaller piles – and these obscenities SHOULD be regarded as piles – have begun to form at the trailhead, at the gravel turnaround, at the porta-can, and on the eastern shoulder of the access track approximately a quarter-mile back from the Disposition, where THERE IS NO REASON FOR A PILE TO BE AT ALL, except that someone passing slowly in a vehicle threw an object out of a window, and someone else, the following day, walking, saw the object and replied to it. The author has identified SEVEN satellite piles. The author considers six of them heresies and one of them, the eastern-shoulder accumulation, interesting, in the most alarming sense of the word, in that it appears to have arisen from a SINGLE DISCARDED ITEM and would constitute, if it continues, evidence that the protocol is now OPERATING WITHOUT THE DISPOSITION, on its own, without supervision, without a marker, without a chamber under it as far as the author has been able to determine. The implications of this are SIGNIFICANT. The author is REFUSING TO REACH A CONCLUSION until further observation, which the author is conducting nightly.
5. THE CATEGORY PROBLEM. What counts as an object? The author would once have said this was self-evident. The author was WRONG. A coin counts. A pebble counts, if it was carried from somewhere. A pressed leaf counts. A ribbon. A small carved figure. A glove. A tooth. What the author does not accept, and what the DISPOSITION, in the author’s view, DOES NOT ACCEPT EITHER, is the recent influx of objects whose nature is to refer to OTHER OBJECTS NOT PRESENT. A card with a printed image of a thing is NOT THE THING. A card with a printed code that, when read by a device, displays an image of a thing, is EVEN LESS THE THING, and is in fact a representational fraud of a kind the author considers ACTIVELY HOSTILE to the protocol. The author has not removed them, because to remove them would be to interfere with the protocol, and the author WILL NOT INTERFERE. The author has merely noted their position and watched them rot, which they do quickly, which the author considers INDICATIVE.
6. THE SUPPRESSION. This is the worst of them. In the past six years, a regional heritage office, which the author REFUSES TO NAME because to name it is to grant it the dignity of existing as a body with a charter rather than the COVER OPERATION it manifestly is, has installed at the head of the access track a series of interpretive plaques. The plaques describe the Disposition as a “folk accretion site of regional interest.” The plaques explain the protocol of reply in THREE SENTENCES designed to make the protocol sound like a recycling program. The plaques include a section headed FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS, which is the language of a hardware store, applied to a SIGNAL FROM ELSEWHERE.
The author considers this the MOST DANGEROUS ATTACK on the Disposition in its history. More dangerous than the Vendor. More dangerous than the porta-can. More dangerous than the SUBTERRANEANS, who at least believe in SOMETHING. The plaques are more dangerous because they WORK. The author has watched visitors arrive at the plaques, read them, photograph them, and LEAVE. They have driven for some considerable distance to see the Disposition and they have stopped THREE HUNDRED YARDS SHORT of the Disposition because they have been BORED OUT of the final three hundred yards by a public information panel.
And here is the part the reader will not be permitted to skip. They have begun leaving objects AT THE PLAQUE. The plaque is GENERATING ITS OWN PILE. The protocol of reply, which the heritage office DESIGNED ITS PLAQUE TO INTERRUPT, has reached up and INCORPORATED THE PLAQUE INTO ITSELF, and the plaque pile is growing at a rate that EXCEEDS any rate the plaque’s contents would explain. Something else is happening at the plaque. The author is watching. The author has been watching for SIX YEARS. The author will tell the reader when the author is ready and no sooner.
VII. How to Visit
The author has been asked, by countless unnamed individuals, to provide practical advice for the visitor. The author will provide it, briefly, and UNDER PROTEST.
Bring an object. The object should be YOURS, in the sense that it has been in your possession for some interval and has acquired some quality from that possession. The quality is not metaphorical. The object carries on it the signature of the hand and the home that held it, in trace amounts the author considers CHEMICAL in nature, and the Disposition reads the signature. A pebble picked up in the parking area does not qualify and the Disposition will know – it carries the signature of the parking area, which is the signature of asphalt and the signatures of every other visitor who has touched it that day, and the Disposition reads that too and will not be fooled. A coin from your pocket qualifies marginally. An object you brought from home, having thought about it, having handled it, having carried it the distance, qualifies fully.
Walk the access track ON FOOT. Do not drive to the turnaround. The turnaround is part of the problem.
Ignore the Vendor. Do not buy from the Vendor. If the Vendor speaks to you, nod and continue.
Ignore the plaque. DO NOT PHOTOGRAPH the plaque. Do not leave anything at the plaque. The plaque is NOT THE DISPOSITION. The plaque pile is not the Disposition either.
Pass the porta-can without contributing to the pile that has formed around it. The porta-can is NOT THE DISPOSITION.
When you reach the Disposition, walk its full perimeter ONCE before leaving anything. Look at what is there. Choose where you will leave your item based on what is already there. This is the protocol and the protocol CANNOT BE DONE IN A HURRY, and the visitor who hurries is leaving a FALSE REPLY whether they intend to or not.
The Friend’s part of the woods is to the north. It is recognizable by a clearing with three large stones and a fallen birch. DO NOT ENTER IT. Do not leave anything there. It is not a Disposition. It is somebody’s HOME, or it was, and the author would like to keep it that way.
VIII. Closing
FACT. The Concord existed. The Concord dispersed. FACT. The Big Man existed, at the heights and in the conditions described in Section II, attested by witnesses whom the author has interviewed and catalogued. FACT. The Disposition exists, at the location described, in the dimensions described, leaning measurably toward the north against four poles the author has marked for forty years. FACT. The protocol of reply has been operating, demonstrably, for at least seventy years, and the structure has accumulated in a manner inconsistent with depositings, as set forth in Section VI. FACT. The Friend existed, in the documented range, with the documented behaviors, across the documented interval, and conducted one hundred and sixty-three documented interventions, of which the author has the catalogue and the photographs and the sprig.
Those are the facts. No party in our region has successfully refuted them. The heritage office has not refuted them. The Subterranean has not refuted them. The vendor has not refuted them. They have offered alternative interpretations. They have not convincingly contested the record.
The author submits that the record, taken as a whole, admits of one reading and one reading only:
The Big Man came to our region, built the chamber, founded the Concord around it for the purpose of generating, over time, the kind of slow accumulating signal that the chamber had been placed to read, and departed.
The requester is whatever The Big Man came from or for.
The question is the visitor.
The Disposition is the answer.
The conical shape is pointing somewhere, and is in the direction of the Friend’s part of the woods, where the chamber receives the signal.
The Concord dispersed because the work that the Concord was founded to do had been done.
The Disposition persists because the Friend placed at the eastern edge of the Old Woods an object which is now buried beyond any recovery in our region – the ORIGIN OBJECT, the founding hand placement, the object that started the reply chain – and assumed The Big Man’s role, and seeded the protocol so that the work would continue without a Concord, without supervision, without the visible founding hand, until the answer is complete and the question can be replied to.
That is the reading. The author submits, further, that no alternative reading accounts for the full record. The Subterranean reading does not. The heritage office reading does not. The folk-art reading does not. The author has tested each of them against the catalogue and each fails at the same point, which is the point at which the conical lean must be explained, or the Friend’s interventions must be explained, or the chamber’s response to weight must be explained, or all three must be explained together. Only the author’s reading explains all three. The author rests on the record.
Allocution: THE DISPOSITION IS BEING MISUNDERSTOOD, AND MISHANDLED, AND SURROUNDED BY PORTA-CANS AND PLAQUES AND VENDORS AND SUBTERRANEANS AND PERSONS WHO WOULD RENAME IT, AND THE AUTHOR HAS WATCHED THIS HAPPEN ACROSS FORTY YEARS AND HAS NOT BEEN ABLE TO STOP ANY OF IT.
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